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I can’t understand, in succinct plain terms, what the desired outcome is here. What would it look like if the ads were not biased, or discriminating, in any ba
by whiddershins 7y ago
I can’t understand, in succinct plain terms, what the desired outcome is here.
What would it look like if the ads were not biased, or discriminating, in any bad way.
- munk-a 7y agoMaybe it'd just look like it looked in the 90's, there wouldn't be targeted advertising and everyone except the marketers would be happier.
- sp332 7y agoThat's why, among other things, Facebook made "a tool so you can search for and view all current housing ads in the US targeted to different places across the country, regardless of whether the ads are shown to you." https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/protecting-against-discrimination-in-ads/ https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/protecting-against-discrim... So advertisers can target you, but they can't keep you from seeing an ad if you go looking for it.
- munk-a 7y agoIf this tool exists and allows ads to be viewed with the same visibility as their normal targeting then why are they bothering with targeted ads anymore?
- mulmen 7y agoBecause most people don't go out of their way to view advertising.
- koolba 7y agoIf people realize they can use this to search directly for housing I can see a side business of creating min priced facebook ads just to get listed.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoI believe the idea is that while the tool gives you an interface to find those ads, it doesn't replace the ads that you see during usage of the rest of Facebook.
- badrabbit 7y agoYou can whitelist what they can target, I mean if you really care about marketers, you can allow site owners to generate 'tags' ad networks can use for that specific page and the content of the tags can depend on the prefernces of the user on that specific site.
- mulmen 7y agoAdvertising has always been discriminatory. Even in the 90s there were multiple billboards, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations in the world. Advertisers select what, when and where to advertise based on who they think is listening. The only thing that has changed is how much we know about the "listener" (or page viewer). The nature of advertising is no different today than it was 100 years ago, only the resolution changed.
- Mirioron 7y agoI don't see how you could even have ads that aren't discriminatory if "proxy characteristics that correlate with age or gender" is enough to be discriminatory? If you put an ad next to a barbershop, then that ad is targeting men through "proxy characteristics that correlate with gender", because it's next to a service that men are much more likely to visit. Is that illegal discrimination too? Are there officials that somehow calculate the locations where you are allowed to put advertising so that it wouldn't discriminate (close enough to shops that both men and women visit)?
- philwelch 7y agoThere was targeted advertising in the 90’s. A lot of it uses direct mail, and profiled consumers based upon their magazine subscriptions. But other things like grocery store loyalty cards and the like were used back then, too. Television, radio, and print advertising was and is targeted by demographic.
- ng12 7y agoLiterally the entire purpose of the magazine industry is targeted advertising. The only reason to publish something like Cosmo or Hustler is to sell adds targeting the types of people who read Cosmo or Hustler.
- sokoloff 7y agoIf you take as a given that I’m going to see ads (as I do), I’d much prefer to see ads that are relevant and interesting or amusing to me.
- chmod775 7y agoSo you're preferring the form of manipulation that works best on you? I'd prefer not to be manipulated at all. In fact I loathe the feeling of being manipulated so much that it extends to all but the least obnoxious brands that try to advertise to me. I can't be the only one who is allergic to advertising that tries to appropriate things from my social groups or background to sell me their shitty mobile data plan, insurance, or phone. The most recent example is some random phone company trying to sell me their data plan with some shitty pun on "cum laude" on posters at university. Ugh.
- sokoloff 7y agoYes. Rather than being peppered with ads for credit repair services, obscure/irrelevant drugs, or other things that I’m not interested in and therefore waste 100% of my time, I’d rather be marketed to about products/services I’d consider buying (or ads that will entertain me).
- cortesoft 7y agoWhat do you mean? In the 90s they had targeted advertising... if you wanted to target people who liked cars, you bought an ad in Car & Driver
- sp332 7y agoFor stuff like "employment, housing and credit", it's illegal to discriminate in advertising. That's why they made a whole new portal to try to avoid discrimination for those kinds of ads. So after a while if you gather data and realize that your algorithm is sexist and ageist, then continuing to use that algorithm to place ads is knowingly using sexist and ageist techniques in advertising. I think the EEOC has the authority to determine how non-discriminating FB will have to be to avoid trouble.
- theartfuldodger 7y agoThose regulatory concerns should fall onto the purchasers list of responsibilities. The EEOC has the authority to censure the parties misusing their advertising options. For example as a marketer who does work in all of the above industries , technology should not limit my use of my dollar. If i have 10,000 for an apartment campaign, i should be able to spend 5k on ads showcasing my apartment gym focused on men and 5k on the view of the gym full of men targeted to women.( tongue in cheek example) If the actual top level strategy is not discriminatory but rather is segmented to allow better messaging, any bullshit tech blocks shouldn't get in the way. Let the regulators do their jobs the old fashioned way. You are right though, there are always ways to define the necessary audience using the the type of qualifiers you describe.
- salawat 7y ago>Those regulatory concerns should fall onto the purchasers list of responsibilities. Firearm/drug/financial regulations have already ruined that approach for you sadly. It has been deemed time and again that the easiest place for regulators to apply pressure is on those producing the thing to be regulated. It is much easier to stop (undesirable thing) when the means of making (undesirable thing) happen are either tightly controlled or otherwise forbidden. The smaller numbers of major players created by the necessarily high capital investment is much easier to control and surveil than having to keep every Tom, Dick, and Harry honest. It's weird. I've been getting so disheartened as I branch out and diversify into various regulated fields of activity just to realize how much we have to hamstring ourselves to keep everyone honest; or at least to have a snowball's chance at figuring out what happened when something went wrong in order to ensure it won't happen again. Half of me wants to chew my shoe over the degree of difficulty and implicit frustration encountered trying to get anything remotely compliant off the ground. The other half of just kind of bows it's head at the fact that the rule ended up coming into existence to solve one problem or another. Cognitive dissonance and I seem to be full-time roommates nowadays, and it's rather exhausting. All part of growing up I suppose.
- badrabbit 7y agoIn my opinion, incorrect bias can happen only if either the input or process is bad. So, if you consider the output undesirable then there is a problem with input or process. Ideally, ads would not be targeted at all in any way and micro targeting should be a crime (for privacy reasons as well). Short if that, you target people because of their proven individual preferences and tendencies as opposed to using their membership of any larger group of any kind as an input variable. Regardless of how much accuracy it enables, associative generalization is the core problem here, even without protected classes like race for example, I don't think it should be legal for any ad content to target me because I am a member of HN,now if by my explicit consent the ad system discovers I like specific topics which are also common on HN then they can use those individual level inputs WITHOUT associating it with my HN membership. Essentially, the enemy here is formation of social bubbles as a result of explicitly clustering individuals into easily targtable micro groups. In other words, it is easier to sell ads that target specific micro groups but not so much for specific individuals.
- blackoil 7y agoThis would entail no magazine/blog should also be targeting to a social group. i.e. no men's or women's magazine
- badrabbit 7y agoWhat a silly argument, the magazine is not the advertiser. It's fine for content to target groups but not ads! You can have a men's magazine and the ads on there can target men, you can't have a men's magazine that sends out prints with ads targeting specific subsets of men. Content targeting is fine, user targeting is not.
- blackoil 7y agoSo you are saying articles about best jobs targeted by gender will not create social bubbles, but an ad will do so?
- 7y ago
- sandoooo 7y agoYou can't understand because you're not reading between the lines. The surface message is self-contradicting, but the underlying is clear-cut. They want a world where advertisers are not allowed to direct messages at their outgroup or the things their outgroup like. You will be allowed to sell perfume to women by putting a model on your billboard, but the same model can't sell ferraris to young men. Shaving razors shall follow only the Gillette model, no glorification of masculinity. Want to advertise your engineering position on FB? Better prominently advertise your diversity programme and paid maternity leave and nothing else. Definitely don't mention beer night.
- currymj 7y agothis is a pretty paranoid view. the restrictions only apply to very specific categories where there have been laws against discrimination for many decades. perfume and razors are not among them.
- sandoooo 7y agoSpecific categories such as employment and housing, for example? Urgh, fine, pretend my examples were about bachelor pads. Same deal: don't target the young men who actually buy them, because we don't like those people and we don't want any part of the economy to cater for them. There is no material change in my argument.